I stayed there, watching. The sound of it died in the distance, but it was still visible, a speck and dropping to the horizon, and then it was gone. But only for a moment. I saw it again, much lower. It had banked, searching low down along the desert rim. I called to Kennie to take a bearing, but he couldn’t see it from where he was. He had one of the jerricans out of the back of the Land-Rover, a rag in his hand. I yelled at him to bring me my compass, my eyes concentrated on the plane. ‘The compass,’ I screamed at him.
The plane was still there, circling low down, when he thrust it into my hand. The bearing was 112° magnetic, the distance — what? Ten miles? Fifteen? It was difficult to tell. I slipped the compass into my pocket and stood waiting, the old gold hunter in my hand, holding it up so that I could see it and still keep my eyes on the plane. ‘Twin-engined, wasn’t it?’
‘I think so,’ he said.
The same plane then. ‘What’s its speed?’
But he didn’t know. ‘The small Cessnas do about 140, I reck’n.’
Say 160–180. It would be a question of counting the seconds. Out of the tail of my eye I saw him running back down the slope. He reached the jerrican, was soaking the rag in petrol. And then the speck was turning and heading back and my eyes were on my watch, counting aloud as it grew larger, the sound of it faintly audible again.
Fire blazed in a patch of spinifex, the crackle of flames momentarily distracting me. Thick oily smoke began to billow up. But slowly. Too slowly. And the plane a long way to the south of us, climbing steadily. The fire died and the smoke with it. Four minutes. Five. Six. And twenty-thirty-forty seconds. It was due south of us now, still climbing, the sunlight on its wings, but five miles away at least. Fire crackled again in the spinifex, the black smoke rising in a thick cloud. Six minutes forty-five seconds. Allowing for reduction of speed due to the angle of the climb, that made it just over a dozen miles to the point where it had been circling. Say five hours’ walking. If Ed Garrety failed to return by nightfall….
I was almost back at the Land-Rover then, suddenly conscious of Kennie yelling at me, blaming me for the fact that they hadn’t seen us. ‘You and your damned compass. If you’d left me to get that fire going …’
‘We know where it is anyway,’ I said.
‘And what good’s that do? Look at it now!’ The fire was racing through the whole area of spinifex, the resinous smoke rolling skyward, a thick black streamer. ‘They’d have seen us.’ He was almost crying with exasperation.
‘They couldn’t land,’ I said wearily. That damned boy! Why couldn’t he shut up? ‘Be practical.’
‘You be practical,’ he shouted at me. ‘You think you’re going to walk it?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re crazy then. You’d never find him.’
‘Got any better ideas?’
‘If you’d left me to get that signal fired …’
‘Oh, shut up!’ I was sick and tired of him. ‘You waste your energies fooling around with a bit of metal. Then you expect a plane to land in this stuff.’ I could hear the high trembling in my voice, nerves screaming and the exhaustion of heat wearing my patience. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, forcing myself to speak slowly, rationally. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. We’re both of us tired.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘We’ll have some food — a brew-up. We’ll feel better then.’
‘Like hell! We’ve missed our chance, I tell you.’ I could hear his voice cracking.
‘Pull yourself together.’
‘And what about you? Shut up, you tell me. Well, shut up yourself for Chrissakes. I didn’t ask to come on this bloody trip.’ And he added, his voice still strained to a high pitch, ‘I don’t know who’s crazier, you or that old man. I want to get out of here, that’s all. Out of here, and alive, see.’
I didn’t answer him. Better to keep my mouth shut or I’d end up striking the young fool. I began collecting sticks of vegetation, the sun sinking and the desert all on fire with the redness of light and sand. A dozen miles. Five hours in the cool of the night. Then search for him in the dawn light. It ought to be possible. Distance and bearing were both pretty accurate. I got the cook fire going, filled the blackened billy with water and put it on the flames. Midnight. I’d give him till midnight. If he hadn’t returned by then, I’d start walking.
In fact I started before midnight. Twelve miles doesn’t sound much, but in the dark, with the sand dotted with spinifex clumps, littered with dry vegetation — it would be like stumbling through a teeming mass of porcupines. And I was scared. I can admit that now. I was scared that in the dawn I’d find nothing. Nothing but that blinding emptiness, with the sandridges bobbing dizzily in the heat and no alternative but to retrace my steps. Fear feeds on inaction and the fear in me started the instant darkness clamped down. The headlights of a Land-Rover would be visible for miles then, but though I stood for a long time on the top of the ridge staring into the dark of the desert there wasn’t the glimmer of a light anywhere. Only the stars above, and all around me the frozen stillness, the empty silence of the desert.
I began collecting my gear shortly after ten — waterbag, compass, torch, food, matches, cigarettes. And Kennie arguing all the time. It was crazy, he said. I’d lose my way, wander aimlessly till I died of thirst. First he tried to dissuade me, then he wanted to come with me. But how else would I find our Land-Rover again if he wasn’t there to light a bush signal to guide me in? He saw the sense of that, but he didn’t like it. He was scared, scared of being left on his own, stranded beside a useless vehicle. ‘If I don’t come back,’ I told him angrily, ‘then the plane will find you.’ But I don’t think he was very sure about that, any more than I was. ‘Well, what else do you suggest?’
That shut him up because he hadn’t anything else to suggest.
We couldn’t just stay there, waiting and doing nothing. Not when there was a chance Ed Garrety was only a dozen miles away. And then, just as I was leaving, he said a bloody stupid thing to me. He said, ‘If you started walking south instead of east, a few hours and you wouldn’t be all that far from where Gibson disappeared.’
I rounded on him then. ‘I’m not disappearing,’ I said. ‘I’m going twelve miles, that’s all. And if I don’t find him, I’ll lay up during the day and walk those dozen miles back tomorrow night.’ And I told him to fire a patch of spinifex just before sunrise to guide me in.
‘Well, I hope to Christ you find him,’ he said.
‘So do I.’
I left him then and started walking, the satchel with my gear bumping my hip, the compass in one hand and the waterbag in the other.
The first hour wasn’t so bad. I had changed into a pair of khaki longs and the spinifex wasn’t very thick, plenty of sand between the clumps, and I was in a flat plain, walking diagonally across it with the next sandridge a good two miles away. At first I found it difficult to hold a course, the light of my torch blinding me every time I checked the compass. I solved that by lining the bearing up with a star, then I didn’t have to use the torch and could concentrate on where I was putting my feet.
If it had all been like that I would have made it in four hours, but over the next sandridge the going was bad. I was in a narrow trough between two ridges, the spinifex thick, my feet stumbling and spines like darning needles stabbing through my trousers. Ridge succeeded ridge, almost no gap between, the slopes steeper and the sand soft. I was sweating, conscious of the weight of the waterbag and beginning to tire. A gap opened out and I was into a patch of dead mulga scrub, the roots like giant spikes. I had to make a long detour round it and in spinifex again I began to stumble.
I paused then for a breather and checked my watch. One hour twenty-two minutes. I could have sworn it was longer than that. I went on again until I had done two hours, and then I sat down and smoked a cigarette. My knees were trembling and I was very tired. Two hours. Did that mean I had covered four miles? How fast had I been walking? I finished my cigarette and went on for another hour, the going variable with two long detours to the north across the ridges. It was easier after that, patches of open sand and gravel, but the stillness, the loneliness, getting on my nerves. I began to understand why the aborigines believe in their mamu. Time and again I could have sworn I saw a movement, shadows flickering in the desert. Kangaroo perhaps, or euros. I think they were really wallaby. But no sound, only the soft scuff of my feet in the sand, the scrape of the spinifex against my trousers.